I’d like to submit for the community’s consideration, the idea that guild buffs are awesome and should still be a way to benefit members of the guild as well as serve as a draw for recruitment, but starting players, players unaffiliated with a guild, or players finding a need to create more temporary working relationships between people doing the same activity, should be able to form a team.
Moreover, creating a team should confer bonuses. What those bonuses should be, I will leave to you to think about, but a few suggestions are things like:
Increased yields from mining and gathering, crafters gaining slight increases to time efficiency if they work in a team and in proximity, that sort of thing. Hunting teams which increase the drop rates of certain items, etc…
It would introduce and encourage cooperation between players, even if it’s only on a temporary basis, born from mutual need to get a specific job done. Such things can also allow a guild to better evaluate how a prospective member might fit into the group dynamic, while it remains an informal relationship which even for all that, still confers benefits for everyone involved.
Honestly, from a mechanics perspective, it could scale very similarly to what is done by the game to judge the size of meteor it should drop. The bigger the team, the bigger the bonuses it confers, up to a specific size or amount, with a cap on team size and bonuses that can only be raised with skills.
Anyway, that’s my two cents regarding how I feel the experience of interacting with other players could be vastly enriched based on my time in the game, trying to help organize group acquisition of resources, or concerted crafting efforts.
Even the newest player would be able to avail themselves of at least slight bonuses by working together with someone else, while also largely allowing the devs to leave other systems like guild buffs alone, or make only slight alterations to them for balancing.